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Party-Determined Viability and Gender Bias in Open-List Proportional Representation Systems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2019

Rimvydas Ragauskas
Rimvydas Ragauskas*
Affiliation:
Texas Tech University
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Abstract

Using individual-level data from three Lithuanian legislative elections (2008, 2012, 2016), this article investigates voter bias in an open-list proportional representation system in which parties rank candidates but voters are able to fully influence the rank order through preferential voting. This study examines the average effects of and variation in gender bias among voters of different parties. Most importantly, it also investigates how party cues interact with gender cues—that is, whether discriminatory tendencies vary by a candidate's party-determined viability. After establishing that there is no evidence of elite bias in favor of or against women candidates, with the exception of the Social Democrats and a few other parties, I demonstrate that, on average, female Lithuanian politicians receive approximately 7% fewer preferential votes than their male counterparts. In addition, the models predict that gender bias is most pronounced against the female candidates who are best placed to enter parliament. Finally, I demonstrate that Social Democratic voters are, on average, the most undisposed toward female candidates, correcting for positive elite bias toward female candidates from the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party, while voters of the Homeland Union party (conservatives) strongly prefer women politicians.

Keywords

Gender biasproportional representation systemscandidate viabilityCentral and Eastern European countriesLithuania
Type
Research Article
Information
Politics & Gender , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , June 2021 , pp. 250 - 276
Copyright
Copyright © The Women, Gender, and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2019

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Footnotes

Supplementary and replication materials related to the subject of this article are available from Harvard Dataverse at the following link: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/CAEBM1.

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